"`This is the statute of the Torah' -- because Satan and the
nations of the world taunt the Jews, saying: What is this
commandment and what logic lies behind it? Therefore does the
Torah establish it as a statute, an arbitrary decree before
Me, which you have no permission to question" (Rashi
Chukas 19:1).
This principle is an axiom for the entire Torah. "It is a
decree before Me." Hashem, Creator of heaven and earth,
formed man and established the Jewish nation; He gave the
Torah and He commands us: "This is the statute of the Torah."
It is one great entity of Creation which is comprised of
heaven and earth, man and all other creations. And the holy
Torah sets Israel apart from all other nations and tongues.
"Thus says Hashem: if I have not appointed My covenant with
day and night, the ordinances of heaven and earth . . . "
This is a Jew's warranty, his guarantee that the Eternal Who
has chosen Israel will not lie, will not renege on His
promise, and by virtue thereof, he must fulfill the Torah and
its commandments because this is the divine will, because it
is a divine arbitrary decree [as far as he is concerned]. The
Jew in history, who constitutes a link in a long chain of
three and a half millennia since the giving of the Torah, was
not trapped in the net of questions and doubts, but remained
staunch in this belief that every single commandment which he
was given to fulfill is "because the Torah requires it." He
need not look for rationale, for this very principle -- that
mitzvos are beyond reason -- is the underlying axiom of all
the commandments. Any induction that the human intellect can
produce, be it ironclad in logic, is ever subject to
challenge -- excluding the fundamental premise that "This is
a decree before Me." Heavenly will is non-debatable.
*
"Why does the Torah use the term chukas precisely by
the commandment of the poro adumo -- and generically
call it `the statute of the Torah'? Also difficult in Rashi's
explanation is that if we needed an explanation of this
commandment for the gentiles, why didn't the Torah furnish
it? For our own purposes, it is enough that Hashem commanded
it thus; for theirs, it is not.
"This is why Rashi explained that Satan and the nations etc.;
that even if the reason behind this particular commandment
were explained to them, they, in their foolish stubbornness,
would find some rejoinder to rebut. If the reason were
explicitly stated, they might have the power to nullify and
dismiss it, G-d forbid, and then we could not offer any other
reason, since they would claim that it was not written in the
Torah . . . " (Noam Elimelech p. 80b).
We certainly cannot suggest any reason other than what is
stated in the Torah because we are not authorized to do so.
While the summit of a Jew's aspirations is to make an
acquisition of Torah, this can only be achieved through toil
in Torah, whereby it is absorbed into his fiber and becomes
an integral part of his essential being. Not the opposite, G-
d forbid. Man cannot subjugate the Torah to his own mortal
intellect. This is the lesson we derive from this portion and
why it is established as an unquestionable statute. "For all
tum'as meis is derived from the original sin of eating
from the eitz hadaas. `And you shall be like G- d,
knowing good and evil.' Purification from sin can only come
about through the nullification of one's intellect and reason
as was the divine will that Adam not eat from the Tree and
not be subject to the trials of life. But Satan and the
nations attempt to incite the Jews, just like the Serpent
enticed Chava with the lure of being able to understand
everything through man's limited, lowly intellect. But Jews
do not succumb; they follow their faith and rely on the
divine wisdom in the Torah and its commandments without
inquiring into it, and this is their merit; this enables them
to achieve purification from sin" (Sfas Emes, Poro p.
110).
This is a Jew's obligation, his goal -- to subjugate his
whole will and intellect to the Torah and to the `mind' of
the Torah. Anything outside of this is the very antithesis of
the process of subservience to Torah; it demotes him from the
status of the historic Jew and nullifies him as a human
being, altogether. "Behold, I have given before you today
life and goodness, and death and evil. And you shall choose
life so that you shall live, you and your seed"
(Devorim 30:15-19). The most clever person, even one
who reaches new peaks of revelation in science and research,
stands impotent when he is confronted with the key, the
secret of life, itself. This is your limit, man. You can
inquire no further. Why? Because. "Behold, I have given
before you today life . . . "
Hashem grants life. And equally, He establishes good and evil
and their demarcations, as that very verse goes on to state.
Man has no choice in determining what is life and what is
good. His sphere of choice lies only between life and death,
good and evil. And the Torah charges us to "Choose life so
that you shall live; you and your seed."
*
The true reason for all this is "It is a decree before Me."
All of the Torah is statutory, in the same manner as the
poro adumo, which is obviously so. This is the
historic route of our ancient people through the halls of
time, beginning with Avrohom who was commanded to "Walk
before Me and be guileless." A Jew proceeds with
unquestioning faith -- and he survives to endure. When he
veers from his simplicity and tries to `understand,' he is
shunted off the route leading to eternity, and all kinds of
calamities befall him, major and minor. A Jew who does not
submissively accept the decrees of the A-mighty implicates
himself in trouble and arrives ad absurdum.
At first, he deceives himself into thinking that he has
succeeded, and becomes smug. "Ah," he pats himself, "I've
made it!" That is what happened to the first mavericks. They
succeeded in erecting the Tower of Bovel, because Free Choice
operates, but further than that was beyond them. And so on
down the line of history.
The State has experienced periods of shock waves, like when
one general compared the `knitted kipot' to the swastika. A
leader from the Opposition blurted impulsively that had he
been born a Palestinian, he would have joined a terrorist
organization. A secular-leftist writer who won the Israel
Prize for Literature was attacked for an article he wrote ten
years before criticizing the settlers. Another awardee of the
Israel Prize for literature was a poet from the same circle,
who wrote: "There is no longer reason to conceal:/ We are an
experiment that failed,/ A program that fell through,/ At the
cost of far too much murder . . . "
No one rose up to challenge her right to the prize in the
jubilee year of statehood. just like she did not announce, to
date, her refusal to accept this honor from the State, and
the Zionism that preceded it, against both of which she
passes her judgment. "An experiment that failed; a program
that fell through." The reasons why such statements went
unchallenged, and why she did not reject the prize -- remain
a riddle. But that's beside the point we wish to highlight --
that of an outright admission of "an experiment that
failed."
*
Those who are truly distant are unable to grasp the meaning
of this. But we are dealing with people who should,
ostensibly, understand. They wear kipot; they study
Torah and keep its commandments. In spite of this, they are
misguided. One of them, Yisroel Harel, the former Chairman of
the Judea-Samaria Council, a man of letters, writhes in
literary acrobatics in an article explaining the nature of
the abysmal hatred that is being generated from the left
towards the Zionist right, especially in that unfortunate
statement comparing the knitted kipot to the swastika,
or in an essay written ten years ago against the settlers by
the writer who was awarded the Israel Prize.
His argument is that there is a deep-seated envy amongst the
leftist camp towards religious Zionists. To uphold this
theory, he quotes Professor Ravitzky, who sports a
kippa and is a leader of Meimad, as saying, "The
engineer in the Zionist `train' was always the socialist
elite. My parents were also passengers of that train, but the
only car that remained free for them -- and this, at an
outrageously high price -- was the dining car, where they
served as kashrus supervisors. Towards the end of the '60s,
the children of these supervisors began making their way
towards the more central cars. And now, when the engineers
have reached the end of their road, they remain, in their
sights, the only ones whose inceptive Zionism has remained
`unadulterated'. This is why they feel fit to steer the train
to its original destination, and to monitor the wheel since
the role of engineer held by the founding fathers no longer
interests their direct descendants, many of whom actually
despise it."
Harel's big error, common to all his fellow religious
Zionists be they more to the political right or less, is that
they think that they merely occupied the wrong car in the
past, but have finally reached their rightful place. The
truth is that they have been traveling with the wrong
locomotive for the past century. Theirs is the train of
delusions, of the big mistake, the train that is waylaying
its passengers off the main track of the Judaism of history,
of the ages.
It is no mere chance that when a nation leads a campaign
against Hashem, His Torah, and His loyal ones, those on the
train do not produce as much as a tweet of protest. On the
contrary, they hasten to join the inciters and hurl oil upon
the fires of hatred against the true altruists of the State,
those who lay aside temporal comforts and devote themselves
to eternal values, those who possess an exalted ideology and
subjugate themselves and their intellects to the Divine
wisdom of Hashem and His Torah, and reserve for themselves no
more than the four cubits of halocho. When do they
rouse themselves? When the hate campaign suddenly swerves to
their direction, to include them. Those who invaded the
central train cars. A famous popular singer, a fourth
generation of the founders of Nahalal, once noted that the
train was headed Nowhere. And now, the winner of the Israel
Prize is none other than a poet who defines the Zionist
experience as `an experiment that failed, a program that went
haywire.'
*
Jewish history is not like raw material in the hands of a
mortal craftsman. It is unique, different from anything else
that exists by other nations. The Agudist thinker and writer,
HaRav Dr. Yitzchok Breuer z'l, frequently used the
term "metahistory" with regard to the Jewish people.
World history follows certain laws, as does nature, but the
Jewish nation is set apart from other nations; it is excluded
from these laws, being above them and subject to metahistory,
which, in turn, is directed directly by Hashem Who elevated
us above all tongues and implanted eternal life within us.
Many mighty nations have perished from the face of the earth
leaving no trace, while the Jewish nation has survived all
persecution that seemingly threatened its existence. For this
there is only one explanation:
"Said Hashem: I promulgated a statute, issued a decree. You
are not permitted to transgress it" (Bamidbor Rabba
19:1). The natural law of history determines that there is no
justification for the survival in this cruel world of a
small, persecuted nation. But since the Jewish people
occupies a metaphysical place in history, in the very cycle
of "Behold, I present before you today life . . . ," and in
the merit of those who do choose good which comes coupled
with life, this nation has been able to surmount all barriers
of natural existence and survival and thereby proves, before
the very surprised eyes of all historians, the axiom of " . .
. so that you shall live, you and your seed."
Those who rebel against the decree stand abashed and
rejected, and this includes even those who affixed a
mezuza, as it were, upon their train car. One cannot
occupy a place both in the movement of Nimrod and that of
Avrohom. We read in the haftorah of Parshas Ki
Siso the piercing clarion call of Eliyohu Hanovi: "For
how long will you straddle the two sides?" There can be no
coexistence between the great belief that Hashem is G-d and,
lehavdil, the Baal. One must choose.
A strange thing is happening to the kippa sruga camp.
At the very peak of their adherence to Zionism, their former
partners-in-politics turn against them and denounce them for
those very points which should stand to their credit. They
are the last of the expansionists of the settlements, the
best soldiers. How stinging and painful is this slap in the
face! Instead of serving as the counter-force to the anti-
religious accusation of `draft dodgers' and `haters of Eretz
Yisroel,' they are being attacked with a venomous, satanic
vengeance.
A general in the reserves compares the knitted kipot
to the Nazi swastika, and Yisroel Harel writes that the
general serves as a mouthpiece for all those who called him
up in support. Settlers are branded by a writer who won the
Israel Prize for literature as those "who sprung up from the
sewers to the center stage of history." And some go so far as
to mention the forgotten fact that in 1975, the serving prime
minister called the settlers "a cancer in the body of Israeli
democracy."
From the corner of their eyes, they glance towards the Reform
and other pluralism advocates. Yisroel Harel, who was so
shocked by the abysmally overt hatred towards those who wear
knitted kipot was, himself, not below stooping to
attacking the chareidim, in a central newspaper, which
categorically slings mud at both the religious and chareidim
alike. In spite of all this, they are being thrown to the
lions, not because they are not Zionists, but precisely
because they are what they are!
*
In utilizing the simile of the train and the cars, Harel
expresses his dream-wish of "the State of Israel as a Jewish,
democratic state." That is, of occupying the engineer's cabin
of that wayward train chugging down the wrong track. Even
after the wave of hatred has crashed down upon their heads,
don't those people see everyone screaming at them: get off
the train; it's headed down a cliff! That is not the way to
the Jewish goal of "This is the statute of the Torah," above
and beyond Time, beyond Nature and beyond Place. For "I have
promulgated a statute, issued a decree [and] you are not
permitted to transgress My decree." Whosoever dares to do so
is cast out of the eternal metahistory cycle and shunted to
that of history limited by temporal laws of cessation and
persistence.
The Zionist ethos is not Jewish; it was shoplifted from the
nations, which is why it is "an experiment that went awry,"
as those who are disillusioned by it readily admit. Nor can
it ever succeed, even if the last of its adherents, the
wearers of the knitted kipot, stubbornly and
religiously cleave to it. The destiny of the Jewish people is
the hoped-for spiritual redemption which must be preceded by
the purification of the poro adumo. "Chazal ordained
that this portion be read before Nisan since just as a wave
of renewal descends upon Israel in Nisan, so does
purification descend upon the souls of Israel beforehand . .
. And since in Nisan we expect to be redeemed, surely before
that redemption Hashem will waft a spirit of purification in
the hearts of Bnei Yisroel" (Sfas Emes, Parshas
Poro).
